As different as two friends could be - Barbara Colter had led a sheltered life, protected by her controlling mother, whereas Nancy Oliphant had been the wild child of a social-crusader mother, often left to her own devices - the two young women in this work of romantic women's fiction from 1937 end up finding their unlikely happy endings. When tragedy strikes the Colter family, in the form of Mr. Colter's suicide, it sends Barbara into a tailspin, leading her to question everything she's ever known. Realizing that she never really knew her father, and getting an unwelcome glimpse of her mother's coldness, she also questions who she herself is. Fortunately, Nancy is there to step in, and the two young women head to a small town in the Adirondacks, where Barbara has inherited a modest summer home. Here, in Saddle Rock, they attempt to turn Black Brook Camp into a paying venture - a "dude ranch" of the east. Darril Burgess, in the meantime, the down-on-his-luck young man that Barbara cannot forget after their one meeting, also ends up in Saddle Rock, as does his friend Jerry Seton, with whom Nancy had a misunderstanding-laden romance. Will the four young people manage to set things right between them...?

The third adult novel I have read from Jane Abbott, following upon her The Inheritors (1953) and Fiddler's Coin (1934), this was a book that I found both interesting and poignant, during the first half of the story, and trivial and irritating during the second. The story of the Colter family was fascinating! Abbott has a knack for writing about fairly unpleasant older women, women who are emotionally stunted or damaged in some way, or who are manipulative and emotionally abusive, without ever making them seem like monsters. Perhaps this is because she manages to create believable passages from the perspective of such characters, allowing the reader to enter into their thoughts and feelings. Whatever the case may be, Barbara's mother, Adeline Colter, was an example of this type. The sub-plot involving Mr. Colter was fascinating as well, and brought to mind the terrible events of the Great Depression, during which this story is set. The many, many suicides during the period, as people were brought to ruin, were often reported in the newspapers of the day, so it was intensely moving to read Darril's reflection (written by Abbott at the time these events were occurring) that "things like that had been happening, all over, since the big crash - men jumped from roofs and out of hotel windows or threw themselves under subway trains or into rivers - you read about it, often enough. You said to yourself that it was each fellow's own business, if he wanted to do it. But when you were in on the finish it had different dimensions..." Not only did this aspect of the story capture the despair of the times, in ways unusual for light fiction, but it made me think, as I was reading, of the similar spate of male suicides occurring today, and how differently we have reacted, as a society. In those days, such events were notable, and were seen as tragic. Today I sometimes feel that people are indifferent, and that some even make light of the trend. We certainly haven't improved, in that respect.

Unfortunately, although I found the first portion of the book both interesting and poignant, the second part, in which Barbara and Nancy try to get their boarding house up and running, just felt silly and unnecessary. I couldn't care at all about the various characters who came to stay, nor about Darril's drama with Brenda, the down-on-her-luck waitress he adopted (so to speak). Everything about the 'dude ranch' was uninteresting, and after the serious issues raised in the first portion of the story, felt almost irritating in its triviality. This one was a mixed bag, and probably the Jane Abbott title I have enjoyed least, of the eleven I have thus far read. Recommended only to completists (like me) trying to read all of Abbott's work. ( )